Browsing All Posts filed under »Reports abroad«

Finally, after 50 years, the story of the chaotic, haphazard attempt by a hopelessly ill prepared couple to paddle a 5metre kayak from London to Dar es Salaam. Published in South Africa next month as A hat, a kayak & dreams of Dar.

According to South African President Jacob Zuma, opposition parliamentarians are an embarrassment to him, at home and abroad. “I go around Africa and people ask me very embarrassing questions about this parliament,” he told a national assembly boycotted by almost all the opposition parties following the physical expulsion of Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) members.

The political teflon that seemed to enable South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma to slip out of one scandal and crisis after another has been ripped away by the Constitutional Court. But he still sows no signs of budging and even electoral damage may not move him.

With the insecurity and fear still being spread by the global economic crisis, all the resentment and tensions of recent decades is coming to the surface in South Africa and the recent campus upheavals are a good — and nihilistic — example.

South Africa’s teflon president Jacob Zuma, was at it again in February, slipping away from responsibility after the State of the Nation Address debacle in parliament. But no matter what transpires over the coming weeks and months, the country will not be the same again — and a state of emergency may yet be on the cards.

The results of the May 7 South African general election — the most critical in the 20 years since the transition from apartheid — including abstentions and spoiled ballots should be a good measure of the mood of the country.

Initial feature published in the Bulletin&Record, Zambia. Is Nelson Mandela dead? Did he die as early perhaps as June 11 and was then maintained in a “permanent vegetative state” only by means of a life support machine? And if he did effectively die, as now seems possible, within days or weeks of his admission to […]